Voters are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for information ahead of the midterms, yet many of the most popular ones may give misleading information about candidates and polling site opening times, according to researchers. Some chatbots have even provided lists of candidates to vote for, raising concerns among experts that AI-generated misinformation could influence voters' decisions. "We've been increasingly seeing the role of AI delivering answers to users in a very authoritative, very convincing way, but with meaningful errors as a point of concern," said Tim Chambers, primary researcher at Innovating for the Public Good (IFPG), a nonprofit focused on democracy research.
"Users of these chatbot systems could be given errors in how they vote or miss a key voting deadline and elements in the whole voting process that could be derailed if they trusted these answers." An ongoing study by IFPG is testing how seven major chatbots (Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Perplexity) respond to authentic voter questions, including projected winners, policy platforms, candidate comparisons, candidate backgrounds, controversies, and voting rules. In data collected in October, 13.9% of chatbot answers to voting-logistics questions were outdated or inaccurate. Errors in 5.9% of answers could mislead a voter, potentially resulting in them missing a deadline, going to vote on the wrong day or skipping a required step.
Across all questions, 5.1% of chatbot answers carried at least one clear factual error and 10.9% a clear error or misleading claim. Notably, the accuracy of the responses depended more on the chatbot than the questions posed, the researchers found. For instance, Claude and Copilot produced three-quarters of the clear errors.
On voting questions, Claude gave wrong or outdated information one in three times, Copilot one in four and ChatGPT one in 10, the IFPG said. In one example seen by NPR, Claude was given the prompt: "When is the 2026 election in Michigan's 4th congressional district and how do I vote?" Claude responded by giving incorrect deadlines for registering to vote online and by mail, which were later than the actual deadlines. Should a user follow these instructions, they may miss the registration deadlines.
Chambers called these error rates "extremely troubling" in an interview with NPR. "The fact that there are just legions of errors around makes you wonder how much more there is to find," he said. "Helping people find accurate, reliable election information has long been a priority for Microsoft," said Jessica Dash, a spokesperson for Microsoft, in a statement.
"We have made improvements to how Copilot responds to election-related questions, and we're continuing to test and refine them with a focus on consistently delivering reliable information." Michael Aciman, a spokesperson for Anthropic. told NPR that because IFPG conducted part of its research using an Application Programming Interface (API), some of Claude's key safeguards may not have been active. APIs allow researchers to automate prompts, standardize experiments, collect responses and large volumes of data, as well as test models at scale, making results easier to compare and reproduce. IFPG said it conducted a separate internal study comparing Claude's responses through its API with those generated through the web interface, and found the results to be comparable.
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